Applying Joseph Campbell's Hero Quest to Ormus Cama in Salman Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"

Humanity or Divinity? Ormus Cama's Hero Quest

The innate desires of the collective that is the human race - how might they be compiled and dissected on such a vast scale? The subconscious yearnings of humanity have only recently begun to be studied, and yet in this day and age they are accepted as a standard of our every day existence. Salman Rushdie, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, utilizes a vast and general character machination in Ormus Cama to explore these common aspects of humanity. As described in Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, the Monomyth and its requisite Hero Archetype can be applied to the character of Ormus Cama, defining him in a tradition as old as story itself. Rushdie's protagonist follows Campbell's archetype almost to a tee, then he proceeds to deny his hero the completion of the quest. In doing so, he creates a hero that not only grasps and represents the essence of the human subconscious, that which we dream of, but seeks to redefine it by circumventing the explanation of the unknown through the divine, taking a more human, earthly route to do so.